Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen (8 page)

One of the questions I am asked most often is whether Oscar ever threatened Sammy with violence or with guns or whether he harmed her in any other way. There were in fact a few times, beyond driving at reckless speeds, when he either seriously frightened her or potentially endangered her life. She was, for instance, in the car when he shot through the sunroof, after being stopped by the police, an incident that still horrifies me when I think of it.

I was also well aware of occasions when he screamed at her and used foul language in arguments. In fact there were times when he yelled at her so badly on the phone that I would hear him shouting on the line from another room!

There was also an incident when Sammy was sitting on the bed at his house in Silver Woods. Oscar was on his phone,
SMS
ing as usual, when she playfully jumped on his back, trying to see what he was doing. She later told me how he got really angry and threw
her off his back onto the bed. He obviously didn’t want her to see who he was texting. He also “playfully” bit her once, and she had really deep bruising and bite marks on her arm. They looked awful.

It seemed as if Oscar regularly got into fights. He told us one evening how he had kicked someone in a heated argument at a club and his leg had come off. And he often had verbal fights during which he screamed and shouted at his friends, even at Sammy’s friends, which I found deeply upsetting. I wondered how a man, who came across to so many as well mannered and inspirational, could treat and speak to young girls like this.

In November 2011, just after Sammy and Oscar started dating, a trainer at our gym in Lonehill tried to warn me, saying Oscar was not who the public thought he was. He said there’d been a number of incidents in which Oscar had behaved badly; he mentioned a recent Kings of Leon concert where Oscar had allegedly gotten very drunk and become verbally abusive towards two women at the concert. The incident was reported in a blog post, titled ‘Oscar Pistorius – Hero or Hooligan?’ written by one of the offended women, posted on the Media24, News24 website, on 3 November 2011. According to the post, after repeatedly falling into them, one of the women tried to admonish Oscar. Things got ugly and he responded by calling them:

“Fucking lesbians.”

When I was told the story by the trainer, it was during the early days of Sammy and Oscar’s relationship and I simply refused to believe that the soft-spoken, well-mannered Oscar who had just come into our lives could be capable of this. I thought people were just being nasty and were simply jealous of Oscar’s success. I often wish I had listened more closely to the warnings.

Whenever stories like these came up, somehow he always managed to get away with it, justifying his actions. He had an uncanny ability to come across as innocent, making himself look like the injured party, and for a long time, because we regarded him as an extended member of the family, we gave him the benefit of the doubt.

However, when Sammy told me of one particular incident,
a number of warning bells went off. She told me about a night when he had been drinking heavily at his home in Silver Woods. Sammy, Oscar and his friend Alex were in the lounge, when he threw alcohol onto the floor, lit it, made this bonfire out of alcohol, picked Sam up and danced with her all over the room, around the fire. She described to me how scared she was as he was quite out of control because of the drinking and he could easily have dropped her. He then tried to pick up Alex and stumbled and fell, which resulted in him chipping his tooth. Sam helped him to bed. Without warning he turned on her and started screaming at her, accusing her of punching him in the mouth and breaking his tooth. Sammy was terrified by his sudden mood change and his aggressiveness and ended up hiding his gun…

Another night when she was sleeping over, Oscar woke up after hearing a noise. He was convinced someone had broken in. He then woke Sammy up to ask her whether she had heard the disturbance. He did this a number of times during their relationship. He always checked whether she had also heard a noise, unlike the night he shot Reeva when he allegedly didn’t establish where she was or whether she had heard the sound of a possible intruder.

Later on the morning after Reeva was shot, in a state of sheer shock and panic I went to Facebook and wrote: “I am so glad that Sammy is safe and sound and out of the clutches of that man – there were a few occasions where things could have gone wrong with her and his gun during the time they dated. My condolences to the family whose daughter has passed away. My heart breaks for you.”

Although I removed the post two hours later because it went viral across the world and I totally lost control over how people were interpreting it, I will never regret saying it. At that point it felt like, by closing the door on Oscar before he began dating Reeva, I had literally snatched my daughter from the jaws of death. I truly believe a tragic incident with Oscar and guns was bound to happen. It was just a matter of how, where and when.

I think guns gave Oscar that same high as sport did. The euphoria produced by the release of endorphins that he derived from running was similar to what he experienced when he was
loading his gun and target practising on a shooting range. I think chasing women and driving fast cars gave him a similar sensation.

And indeed, just as much as Oscar’s fascination with guns caused me sleepless nights, I was also deeply disturbed by the reckless way in which he drove.

He was a super-confident driver as he had been behind the wheel since the age of 12. He regularly broke the speed limit and liked to fraternise with the type of twenty-somethings who lived for fast cars.

After the first time he endangered Sammy’s life by driving at over 300 kilometres per hour with her in the passenger seat, I was always gripped by anxiety when I knew they were driving anywhere. I remember seeing photos of the speedometer and feeling my stomach literally turn. To say that Oscar was obsessed with fast cars is no exaggeration. He owned a few of them, including a super-fast white Nissan GTR that can accelerate from 0 to 100kms in just over three seconds. He named his dog Enzo (after Enzo Ferrari); he was a partner in a company that services Ferraris; and in late 2012 he ordered a McLaren, customised for him with all the bells and whistles.

The order for the car was cancelled after Reeva was killed.

After a row late one night in 2008, while he was still involved in his tumultuous relationship with Vicky Miles, he jumped into his car at 3am and drove from Durban to Johannesburg to make peace. He fell asleep behind the wheel and hit a rail, writing off his car in the process.

When Michael Sokolove, the journalist from the
New York Times
, drove to the shooting range with Oscar, he wrote that: “Oscar’s love for speed went beyond the athletics track to macho pursuits like power bikes and sports cars.”

“We were driving 150 miles (240 kilometres) an hour,” Sokolove said. “There was a point that it was raining. We were on some state turnpike, and he’s weaving in between cars and tailgating them. And just really insane driving. He saw it as sport. But I feared he would hurt himself.”

To Sokolove, he said of his love for running and cars: “Actually
both are pretty therapeutic… If I’m running or I’m out on my bike or in a car, it really takes my mind off things. Take a bike, for example. You’re concentrating so much that you can’t really have your mind on anything else.”

But his love for speed was not limited just to fast cars and motorbikes. In 2009, he had a near-fatal accident in a speedboat at the Vaal, when he lost control of the boat as it hit a submerged peer. He was airlifted to Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg with a fractured skull, a smashed orbital socket, and a broken nose, jaw and several ribs. He spent a week in an emergency ward, undergoing reconstructive surgery, having 172 stitches in his face. He said he had learnt his lesson and would slow down after that, but I think that lesson, as was always the case with Oscar, only lasted for as long as his bruises and cuts showed.

Oscar spoke to us about the accident a couple of times, and always said how upset he was that the media had insinuated that he had been drunk. When he told the story, I believed him, but the photos of the boat strewn with bottles of booze showed a different picture.

In the end, Oscar was never charged with recklessness or negligence for the boat accident. Despite evidence of alcohol he was never breathalysed.

“People could have been killed,” said sports writer Graeme Joffe in an interview. “He could have killed himself – he had to have all that facial surgery. It was obviously a case of reckless negligence. A lot of alcohol was later discovered, but no one did a thing. Everyone from the police to his management covered up for Oscar.”

Indeed, Oscar’s image always seemed somehow to be cleaned up. After 14 February 2013, various pictures of Oscar in macho poses with guns or target practising on shooting ranges were removed from his personal website; it appeared to all be part of the massive PR operation to wipe away any evidence of Oscar’s aggression or love for guns.

In an attempt to do damage control after the Valentine’s Day shooting, the website was transformed overnight to show kind and gentle Oscar doing charity work and being photographed with underprivileged children. Letters of support from fans were posted to give the impression that it was poor Oscar who had been wronged.

Surely, instead of just trying to destroy evidence of the “darker”, more disturbed side of Oscar and sweep it all under the carpet, someone close to him should have listened to his cries for help. Couldn’t those in his inner circle rather have acknowledged his problems with anger, his gun and speed obsession, and made efforts to get him counselling and psychological support to help him, instead of just trying to wipe the slate clean?

In some way, we were all at fault for not doing something to avert the tragedy that occurred on Valentine’s Day 2013.

Sam and Oscar

In early January 2012, Sammy got her final-year school marks back – she had graduated with a good matric result. We were so proud of her; she had spent a lot of time at Oscar’s Silver Woods Estate home studying for her final exams, but we never had to worry about her as Sammy has always managed to stay focused and disciplined. I think that’s why she and Oscar got on so well – they could both focus, give each other space, and understood each other instinctively. In that regard, they really were so similar.

Between January and May 2012, before Oscar left for Europe to train for the Olympics, they seemed to live in each other’s pockets. While we had almost totally moved our lives by then to Somerset West, we still kept our place in Johannesburg, so Sam stayed for weeks at a time either at the Johannesburg house or Oscar’s place in Pretoria, and then every few weeks she’d fly down to the Cape. Oscar often joined her at our house, staying for a couple of days at a time.

I think this was the honeymoon time of their relationship, when they spent hours in each other’s company, at peace and in love. Sammy watched Oscar training at the track, recording times, or hung out with him at home, watching movies or cooking together. They loved making healthy salad lunches. He was very creative with his cooking and loved concocting juices and smoothies. Oscar’s speciality, which he loved making for others, was a green drink made from all sorts of fruits and vegetables. Besides its unappealing appearance, it was a very healthy power drink.

His Silver Woods Estate home was a great place to chill: It was lavish, spacious and beautiful. Although I never visited there, Oscar and Sam showed me many photos of the place. Oscar loved design, and sometimes spoke about how he would have been an architect if he hadn’t become an athlete. It was a huge, Mediterranean-style mansion that demonstrated his keen eye for aesthetics. He had all the latest gadgets – televisions, music systems and a bookshelf full of books, ranging from Donald Trump’s business books to a bio on Formula One’s controversial maverick, Bernie Ecclestone. The walls downstairs were covered with signed boxing memorabilia and a painting of one of Oscar’s heroes, the original rebel without a cause, and fellow racing fanatic, James Dean. He loved art and had started his own collection of South African pieces by Pierneef. We often had long discussions about art. Sam, Henry and I were all passionate about it, and had grown up around beautiful works. Oscar was not an art snob, though; his absolute pride and joy, he once told me, was his 16-seater wooden dining-room table that had been made by his woodwork teacher at school, where he would gather friends for dinners.

I was always amazed that a 24-year-old guy could be so organised on the home front, and have such great taste in art and décor. But in some ways, Oscar was extremely mature; he had, after all, been fending for himself since the age of 17, when he moved into his own place. And when it came to budgets, money was no problem.

Oscar was crazy about animals. He told us that he grew up with cats, dogs, goats and guinea fowl. Before he met Sammy he
bought two white tiger cubs: Vesta, a female and Vulcan, a male, which he kept at the Farm Inn, the private game reserve close to the estate. When they got too big and his training regime got too intense, he was forced to sell them to a zoo.

But his dogs really were the big loves of his life – Enzo, a black-and-white bull terrier and Silo, a light-brown American pit bull. Silo was a rescue dog, who was locked in a room only two metres by three metres until she was three and a half months old when Oscar adopted her.

Although Sam likes animals, she isn’t really a dog person. So when she and Oscar decided to get a puppy from the SPCA, we were all surprised – even more so when we saw how much Sammy had fallen in love with the little dog. They called her Kola and the two of them were besotted with her; she was like their baby. She became their central focus – she even slept in their bed. I was amazed how attached Sammy got to Kola – she would often speak more about the puppy than about Oscar.

I think that’s why it must have been like a knife in the heart when she came across the profile picture of Oscar’s ex, Jenna Edkins, which featured Jenna on Oscar’s bed with little Kola. Sammy questioned Oscar a number of times about whether he had in fact broken things off with his ex and each time he emphatically denied he was having any contact with her – Jenna’s profile pic on Facebook proved otherwise, of course. (This profile pic remained on her profile until well after the Olympic games.)

Kola was just a couple of months old when Matt, Oscar’s housemate at the time, came home to discover the puppy dead in the garden. One of Oscar’s dogs had killed her. Sammy was devastated. I think that on the inside Oscar was stricken, too, but he never showed any emotion about the tragic event.

Sometime later, Sammy came home and revealed how Kola had died, after swearing us to secrecy.

Apparently, Oscar’s dog had also killed Capone, his mom’s little Jack Russell, the dog he had inherited when his mom had passed away. I am sure he was terrified that his dog would be seen as a killer and would need to be put down. As far as I know both
of his dogs are still alive and with him. I always found this quite odd, that two guard dogs did not alert him to a possible intruder on the night that he shot Reeva.

When Oscar and Sammy were with us in Cape Town, we spent mostly happy times hanging out together. In January 2012, we all watched the Australian Open together in our lounge in Somerset West. All of Ty’s mates from university in Stellenbosch were there and we spent a great day together, filled with tennis, lots of food, drink and laughter. Djokovic played brilliantly and won the match against Nadal. A few days later, Oscar flew off to London to attend the Laureus Sports Awards, where he won the highly prestigious Laureus World Sportsperson with a Disability Award. By now he really was part of the family; we were all overjoyed that he’d won and messages of congratulations from friends and family came pouring in, to pass on to Oscar. We were totally in awe when he told us later that he had met Djokovic, who had won the award for Laureus Sportsman of the Year.

But all was not well between Oscar and Sam. During what seemed on the surface to be a happy time in their relationship, Sammy’s trust in Oscar was beginning to fray. She discovered that Oscar was messaging and flirting with other women, even asking them out for lunches or dinners. Of course, when Sammy took him to task over his behaviour, he would deny everything.

He was highly possessive of his phones, never letting them out of his sight, and they were all password protected. One day before he left for the Olympics they were at Sandton City, a huge high-end mall, and Oscar kept trying to rush Sam to get our driver to collect her. She later found out by default that he was trying to hurry her up to leave and get her out of the way as he had invited another girl out on a lunch date. On all these occasions she either forgave him or turned a blind eye. Because he was so good at acting innocent and denying everything, she often doubted her own instincts and suspicions.

One thing that did bother her was the fact that although she had met most of the people in his life, such as his brother Carl and
sister Aimee, his manager Peet and trainer Ampie Louw, he made very little effort to get to know her friends. It was as though by avoiding contact with her friends he would have more control over her and have her more to himself.

Because Oscar was a world-famous athlete, a household name and celebrity with a hectic schedule, he could get away with literally anything.

There were a number of times that he used the excuse of past hurts and previous failed relationships to explain why he found it hard to commit and trust people, especially women. Sam accepted his excuses and reasoning for a while. There was a time that Sam was loyal to a fault, and in the months before he left she was prepared to do anything for him, putting her needs and dreams on hold to give Oscar the support he needed.

She went with him to training, she went along to interviews. In every way she was the rock of support he needed. I don’t think he ever really fully appreciated this until it was too late.

I remember how hurt she was when he came down to Cape Town in January to attend the J&B Met, a very high-profile horse racing meeting and one of the city’s premier social events. Sammy really wanted to go with Oscar, but inexplicably he didn’t invite her. Although she didn’t say anything, I could see she was very disappointed. He flew down the day before the event, but went straight to the home of a very well-known mining family for dinner, and slept over there.

He came to see Sam early on Saturday morning and told us he had seen them for business as they all owned a racehorse together.

Up until now, he had convinced us that it was better for Sam to keep a low profile, so that the media wouldn’t harass her. He said he preferred avoiding public places, and in fact their only outings were to quiet restaurants. And surely the Met was one of the most high-profile and media-saturated events of the year! But it was very sad for Sam that Oscar chose to keep their relationship hidden, as if he were ashamed of her. And I know they would have had a wonderful day together at the races.

With all of Oscar’s excuses, something wasn’t gelling and it was causing me great anxiety on account of Sam. I suspected that there were other reasons that he wasn’t taking her out. I began to imagine that his low-key attitude had more to do with the fact that having Sammy around would prevent him from meeting new girls or, heaven forbid, maybe he was already seeing other girls on the side. Plus if he was still involved with an ex, as I was beginning to suspect, he couldn’t risk the public or his other girlfriends knowing he had a new girlfriend. He often went out “on his own”, and when we saw him afterward, he was usually very hungover.

Finally, in February, Oscar took Sammy out to a public function on the eve of Valentine’s Day to Hyde Park shopping centre on 13 February and then on the 14th he took her to a Valentine’s Day event hosted by one of the big mining families. He gave her a beautiful card and a bunch of flowers. Before she went out for the evening, she was so excited, but afterwards she seemed so sad. Her mood went on like that for days. I finally managed to understand that at the function he had acted as if they weren’t together, and she had spent most of the evening chatting to his friend.

Strange how there was something about Valentine’s night with Oscar! He later told Sam that he hated that night because he and his exes had always fought on Valentine’s.

Over the duration of their relationship his inability to publicly acknowledge her became a pattern; there were often events where Oscar did his own thing, disregarding Sammy and excluding her from his plans. He even went to the launch of one of our very good friends’ radio station without Sam. This infuriated me. What right had he to treat my daughter like this? But just when I was ready to write him off, there were other times when he was extraordinarily loving and attentive. It was as if he alternated between two totally opposite personalities.

I think we all made excuses for him and put it down to his celebrity and the pressures of the Olympics that were looming. Now, when we look back, of course, it is obvious that he was living a double life.

There were so many times when they had made plans and he
would never appear. That’s one of the most disrespectful things you can do to a woman. It broke my heart to see Sam going through that. She was beautiful, young, bright and intelligent and after all the love and support she gave him, she definitely deserved far better treatment.

About a week before Kerri-Lee’s birthday in April 2012, Oscar and Sam had an argument. Once again it had something to do with Sammy suspecting he was seeing other girls. When they fought they were both very stubborn – so neither of them phoned each other for a week. Sam was always very quiet and withdrawn when she was upset, but we could see that this was tearing her apart. Eventually, a couple of days before her birthday, Kerri phoned Oscar, who was also distraught that they had not spoken and she asked him to please come to her birthday lunch at our house in Joburg. He was delighted to have heard from Ke and told her how heartbroken he had been.

The night before the birthday lunch Oscar invited Sammy out to dinner but only pitched up at 11pm very drunk, along with his two new “best” friends. They took Sammy to a club and apparently had a great time and came home really late. Everyone was asleep when I left on Sunday morning to get a few last-minute things for lunch. Oscar left while I was out and came back a few hours later, with a friend in tow, to the lunch, looking really gangsta, wearing mirror glasses and his cap back to front. He was really hungover and made absolutely no effort to speak to anyone. There were about 30 people there, and I saw how uncomfortable Sammy was with his behaviour. I began to be sorry that they had sorted things out as I could see how compromised she felt.

Eventually, after about an hour, he said he had left his wallet at the house where he had dinner the night before – so much for having invited Sammy to dinner – and he was going to collect it quickly. They were gone for hours and when they came back, he looked as guilty as sin. I thought, “You bugger.” I had the impression that he had gone off to a lunch somewhere else. And of course he was full of stories – he had broken down on a bridge over a river, and so
on and so on. We didn’t listen. Sammy kicked him out of the house very quickly and told him never to come back.

He looked very unhappy and embarrassed when he left; I don’t think Oscar Pistorius was used to being treated like that. I couldn’t even look at him, I was so angry. Later on he would bring this up – how hurt he was when Sammy kicked him out, playing the victim, not seeing how he had created the entire scenario through his actions. We were all so proud of Sam for standing up for herself.

But, of course, Oscar managed to wheedle himself back into Sam’s good graces, and somehow Sam found it in herself to forgive him. In May, she went to Pretoria for the two weeks before Oscar left for Italy. Everyone was beginning to ask whether she was going to the Olympics to watch him. I know initially she really wanted to go and worked really hard for me in the business, saving to pay her own way to the Games. But Oscar at this stage decided it would be a bad idea as he said she would distract him from training. So Sam, not wanting to pressure or push him, simply left it alone.